Adventures in and outside the classroom!

May 20th-26th

Tuesday

Today we woke up fairly early. Rachel and Leah finished packing their things, we ate breakfast together, and then we left for the train station. I Walked with them to the station and we said our goodbyes. From here, they are traveling to Mannheim to visit a friend of Rachel's. I hurried off from the station to make sure I got to school on time. School went quickly today with only two hours of lessons and then tutoring after school.

Wednesday

Today I had class with my little ones (6th graders) who I adore. They had written papers on their pets and put pictures on them. I had to correct them each individually. I'm always amazed at how much English these children already know at the age of 11. It's really impressive. In the 13th grade class, we again did oral interviews and my teacher needed me to back her up on the grades she was giving. Then it was my 10th graders who had to write dialogues again and they will be performing them for me next week. After school I had tutoring again and then I came home and relaxed before it was time to go to Dee's school on the other side of the harbor. Her 13th graders were performing a play and since I had been taking her to my school's plays, she invited me to come watch it. Also, her mentor teacher was the director. We cycled through the city to meet Heather on the other side of the water. From there we biked the rest of the way to the school. It was a beautiful day and the view from that side of Kiel was wonderful. I had been on that side of Kiel a few times before but never with my bike. We arrived a little early, so Dee gave us a quick tour of her school, which seems fairly big to me. Then we went into the auditorium to find our seats. To our luck, her teacher Karen had saved us three seats so that we could sit together. The play was hysterical. It was written by the students themselves and they did an amazing job acting. Watching these performances makes me wish that we would have had better drama opportunities in High School. The play was about school life in Germany and had a lot of inside jokes. After the play was over, we decided to bike up to Heather's school so I could see it too, since we were in the vicinity and she is leaving soon. She showed us around the buildings and then we were on our way back home.

Thursday

I had to work on the Abitur corrections once again today, but we finally got them finished and came to agreements on which ones were right and which ones were wrong. The discrepancies arose because the older teachers are more likely to mark things wrong than the younger ones. In some cases there were a few things marked wrong that were ok.

I had my 12th graders today and I was continuing the topic of natural disasters in the U.S. and then I had some pictures from Hurricane Katrina that I wanted to look at and discuss. Of course this didn't run smoothly, because the projector wouldn't turn on. The power supply to it hasn't been working properly for the past month or so and still hasn't been fixed. This caused us to have to change rooms. I had to go get the key for the other room and once again we were faced with technical difficulties. I got the computer on, but the pictures wouldn't come up on the screen. One of the boys in the class, thankfully helped me in getting this to work and I was relieved. Finally after all of this madness we got to look at and discuss the pictures. We barely made it through them all because time was cut short, but made do with what time we had.

Friday

Today I had to substitute for my mentor teacher because she was away in Hamburg. She didn't want her fifth graders to fall behind, so she asked me if I would take the class for her. I told her I would and she planned out the lesson and gave it to me. I had been in this class one time before and she kept warning me that they might misbehave. I just laughed and said I could handle it. Our topic was working in the book on some grammar exercises for the first period. The kids have signs with S's on them and are supposed to hold them up when someone forgets to put the “s” ending on the verb in a sentence. Example: Kate run to school. This is the most common mistake that German students (at least mine) make in the English classroom and I have yet to figure out why this is. They know the right way and they learn it, but perhaps they are just to lazy to remember when you have to use an “s”.... they also have cute sayings that make this easier to remember. Anyway, they asked me if they were allowed to get the signs out and use them and I said yes of course! Why on earth would I discourage this?! The first class went really well and the kids were so quiet while they were working that I had to laugh because if my mentor teacher would have been there, she wouldn't have believed it was them. I let them go a few minutes early and one of the girls whispered to me that the period wasn't over yet. I laughed and told her I knew this, but had nothing else planned and that I would see them after the break for the next lesson!

In the second lesson, we started a new unit on Police, firemen, doctors, etc. I introduced the unit by talking a little bit about what these are like in the U.S. (in German of course, their English isn't good enough to understand this yet) and asking them to share any stories they had about being in the hospital or experiencing fires. Some of the kids had some interesting stories. Then we started the new unit and completed the exercises. After that they were assigned to write a five sentence story using the new vocabulary they learned. While they were writing, one of the girls in the class asked me “Is it nice in the U.S.?” and then said “I want to go.” I told her it depends on where you are but that she should definitely go if she gets the chance. I thought it was really sweet that she asked this. After they were done writing, I let most of them read their stories out loud and then the class was over. Some of their stories were very creative and some were really funny.

After the fifth grade classes, I just had conversation hour with my three 13th graders again. They didn't have any ideas for topics, so we started out talking about stereotypes and then from there we just talked about random things. A lot of the conversation revolved around differences in the U.S. and Germany and what I like and don't like here. They had a lot of questions to ask.
In the afternoon, I had to clean because a girl came by to look at my room. She seemed nice, but I told her to come back on Tuesday night when my roommates would be here so she could meet them. The rest of the day, I spent packing for Munich, since I am leaving tomorrow evening on the night train.

Saturday

Today I went to the store to get some food to take with me on the train. While I was out, I ran into one of the teachers from my school three times within a half an hour. We both had to laugh about this even though she lives a few blocks from me, this isn't that normal. I went to my favorite Doener Restaurant and got a doener to go. I ate this, finished packing my bag and then was off to the station. My first stop was in Hamburg. Here I got on the train to go to Magdeburg. On this train I sat across from man from Senegal who started talking to me. The conversation was fine until he kept asking me for my phone number and trying to get me to come home with him! I thought are you crazy. After he wouldn't stop asking me, I decided to move to the lower level of the train to escape from him. I had to change two more times before getting on my overnight train that would take me to Munich. Unfortunately, I didn't even make t to Magdeburg on the train I got on. The tracks in the state of Sachsen-Anhalt were being worked on and they had a bus replacing the train the rest of the way. We all had to get out and wait for the buses to come and take us to our final station. The bus was of course late. Then the bus driver was driving for over twenty minutes on back country roads and I started to wonder where he was taking us... sure enough he decided that he was heading in the wrong direction and needed to turn around. This made our journey even longer and caused me to miss the overnight train that I was supposed to be on to Munich. I was not a happy camper and neither were the rest of the passengers who also missed their trains. The train conductor had tried to get our trains to wait on us, but there weren't enough people for the trains to wait so long and be delayed because of us.

So I ended up spending the night in the train station in Halle in Sachsen- Anhalt. I could tell I was in the east because of the dialect differences and it was really funny to listen to people talking. I was just happy that the station had an actual building where we could sit inside and you could walk around. Of course I didn't sleep at all for fear that my things would be stolen or that I would miss the next train to Munich at 5:45 that I had to get on. The first hour and a half, I spent talking to two girls from Leipzig, who had just flown back to Germany from a vacation in Iceland. They were really nice and told me all about their trip and how beautiful it is in Iceland. The one girl had left her purse on the last train which had her wallet, passport, camera and money. I told her I would keep my fingers crossed (in German “press my thumbs”) in the hopes that she would get it back. After the hour and a half, they were able to catch a train at 2:30 to get to Leipzig, while I still had three hours of waiting ahead of me. I spent most of the time walking around trying to stay warm (idiot me wore shorts thinking I would be on the warm train all night!) and looking at the map of the region that we spent over an hour riding through on the bus. Finally it was time to get on my train. The conductor had written me an allowance to ride the other trains and I didn't have any problems after this. The one other funny thing that happened on the train ride was that a drunken young couple came up to me and the guy was whispering to me that he didn't have a ticket and to keep the conductor away. He came back five minutes later and yelled at me for letting the conductor on the train. Of course he was joking the whole time. He kept calling me Hannelore and when I told him that my name was Vanessa, he said it was pretty much the same name. I couldn't stop laughing and after a few more minutes of whispering in my ear and shaking my arms, he walked away, satisfied because I had actually talked to him unlike the other “unfriendly people” as he called them. The whole train experience that night reminded me of Kim's stories from the Greyhound buses. I for some reason had all the crazies, along with an interesting journey!

Sunday

After 18 hours of travelling (I could've been to the states and back) I finally arrived in Munich! It was about 11 am and I decided to go straight to the hostel and drop off my bag so I wouldn't have to lug it around while I was waiting for the Bethany crew to arrive. After this, I stopped at an Internet cafe and then went and got a coffee. I walked around Marienplatz for a while and then went back to the station to meet the others. I was looking around the bookstores until time for them to arrive and as I was walking to check the platform they were to come in on, I ran into them! Their train had arrived earlier than expected and they had just tried to call my cell phone which I had turned off because the battery was ready to die. What a coincidence! They went to check in at their hostel and I went upstairs with them. They had a really nice room for the four of them. After they got ready, we met up with Laura and then went to lunch close to Marienplatz. It was so great to see all of them again! I was so happy, but it was also really strange to see them in Germany. It somewhat felt like I wasn't in Germany while they were here. It was also funny because Tessa and I had been in Munich at about the same exact time four years ago!! We were both on the German club trip then and now she was the teacher taking the students and I'm working in Germany! Strange how things like this happen...

We met up with one of Tessa's German friends from Graduate school at lunch and afterwards we went for a walk past the University building where the Scholl's threw out the leaflets about the Nazis. They were executed after the government found out that they did this. There is a memorial for them on the ground there with bronze leaflets. From here we continued walking to the English Garden where the Oktoberfest takes place. I believe it is one of the if not the largest garden/park in Germany. After sitting there for a while, Tessa's friend had to go back home, so we rode with her to the station and said goodbye. The rest of us split up to go back to our hostels. I wanted to check in and relax for an hour or two and the others wanted to do the same before we went out on the town for the evening. We had a fun girls night out and some boys from Minnesota who are traveling around Germany joined us for the evening.